The small installations network filesystem and users.

[Chris Watson]

I'm glad you brought this up. I wanted to but I've heard it before on the lists and realize that there is this disconnect between the developers doing the actual work to implement these things and the end users. 

I have always been very grateful to all the developers who over the years, and I've been a FreeBSD consumer since the late 90s? And attended my first usenix/freenix conf in Monterrey in 2001?, have done some really hard work on many many things in FreeBSD. For zero pay. But the thing that has always bothered me about a lot of it is, it's just to complex to use for most end users. Not all. But people want to get work done. Sifting through .conf files, googling howtos, spending more time configuring it than installing it has always been an issue. Developers in general do not think like an end user. And this leads to non developers just going "screw it I'll just get it running on Linux with my GUI installer." Which is why FreeNas is so popular. It's taken a lot, not all, but a lot of the pain and time consuming nature of learning all the ins and outs of a NAS appliance from the equation. 

It's wonderful to have flexibility and lord knows there are plenty of options and flags for most software. ZFS took a lot of pain out of file systems and volume management. I remember in 2001 staring at an HPUX box trying to figure out Its volume manager and truth be told I never did and wanted to stick my head in a meat grinder. It would have been less painful. I don't know if the problem is simply writing things that are simple and optionally complex is hard? Or if the people doing the work just want it to work for them and don't really want to take even more time to sit down and actually consider the software and its management from a users/consumers viewpoint. 

There was a photo from bsdcan this year of a "sysadmin spotting" shirt. If you read the text on it you actually begin to see how systemic and difficult actually using and configuring most software is. It's probably a good reason most developers use macs. In addition to better HW support. I'm not sure what the solution to this is. I think it would be great if beta testers and the developers had a closer connection and issues were handles in a timely manner. But in a volunteer project I get why that is unreasonable. But I mean go through the bug database and you can see PRs that are years old. I don't know. I just know I'm getting to old to spend all day beating my head against software to get it working. Honestly if I have to spend over an hour reading crap docs all over the net because your manpage make no sense or is vague, trying to configure the software, your software sucks and I'm rm'ing it. I recently went through this with opensmtpd. I went right back to postfix. And all over something as simple or should be as simple as mail aliases! 

Chris

Sent from my iPhone 5

> On Jun 20, 2016, at 4:05 PM, Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but amidst discussions of pNFS (among other
> things) I thought I should bring up something someone said to me: and that
> is (to quote him) "using NFS is too hard, I always fail."
> 
> I can empathize (although I know better) with this statement.  I've been
> using NFS since v2 was a "new thing."  Rick Maclem was the sysadmin at my
> University.
> 
> So here's the thing.  SMB is easier to implement than NFSv4.  NFSv3 is
> easier to implement than v4.  In general, even though I know what is
> required, I implement SMB or v3 rather than v4... which means I'm better
> off than my friend: he just does without network filesystems.
> 
> Back-in-the-day, (1995-ish) I worked for an outfit that released on some 30
> odd platforms including VMS.  We had /d/<machine>/<disk> mounted on every
> machine.  Besides the fact that power outages were a bit of a nightmare
> (many machines didn't recover well if their NFS imports were not yet
> ready), This worked well and you could access your home directory on any
> machine from any other machine.  The company never really had the money to
> have a proper home directory server ... and generally that ended up being
> your own workstation... and we worked on satellite imagery ... so disks
> were always full... and the backbone was 10Base2...
> 
> But just networking 2 FreeBSD boxes' filesystems seems harder than that lot
> back then.  Add in a couple linux boxes and something from M$, and you're
> into the territory where you just scp files around.
> 
> I get the fact that network authentication is hard.  I get that this is the
> problem.  I've made 3 or 4 serious runs at LDAP ... but I haven't gotten it
> working.  Is it time we (FreeBSD) had a solution that at least worked?
> Something ever-so-close-to turnkey?
> 
> I've we're looking at the other more complex adoptions (like pNFS and ZFS
> and whatnot) ... it would seem that we should ship something that has a
> chance of working.
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